Spamassassin start script confused

["Owen B. Mehegan" <ow...@nerdnetworks.org>]

I've recently added a line to my crontab which calls a script to run  
sa-update and restart spamd if new rules are found. Since doing that,  
I'm noticing that the restart doesn't usually work. It returns this  
error: "Stopping SpamAssassin Mail Filter Daemon: No spamd found  
running; none killed."

Digging into it this morning, I see that manually restarting spamd  
with the init script gives the same result. Yet spamd is running:

sandman:/home/owen/spam# /etc/init.d/spamassassin reload
Reloading SpamAssassin Mail Filter Daemon: No spamd found running;  
none killed.
sandman:/home/owen/spam# ps aux | grep spamd
root     17036  0.5  2.1  50188 45592 ?        SNs  09:31   0:01 /usr/ 
local/bin/spamd --create-prefs --max-children 5 --helper-home-dir -u  
bayes -g spamassassin -s /var/log/spamd.log -d --pidfile=/var/run/ 
spamd.pid

Maybe the pidfile isn't there or has the wrong value? Nope:

sandman:/home/owen/spam# cat /var/run/spamd.pid
17036

Maybe the init script is broken and referencing the wrong pidfile  
location? Nope:

NAME=spamd
SNAME=spamassassin
DESC="SpamAssassin Mail Filter Daemon"
PIDFILE="/var/run/$NAME.pid"

So... what's the problem? It seems I can only restart spamd now by  
manually killing it. I never used to have this issue...